President should embrace Simpson-Bowles' recommendations

President Barack Obama answers a question during a news conference at the White House on Wednesday.

President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans have started positioning themselves for negotiations to avoid the rapidly approaching "fiscal cliff."

It is not hard to see the president holds the higher ground.

Which is exactly why Obama should use the opportunity to embrace the very resolution he has shown little interest in supporting: the recommendations of his own panel of financial experts, the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, better known as the Simpson-Bowles commission.

The president won re-election, which recharges his political-cachet batteries.

Of still more help to the president, Obama's Democrats also increased their numbers in Congress.

Further, a poll indicates that if our federal leaders fail to resolve this looming crisis responsibly, the public will blame Republicans in Congress rather than Obama. By a nearly 2-to-1 ratio. A Pew Research Center poll released Tuesday found 53 percent of respondents would blame Republicans, while 29 percent said they would hold the president more to blame.

The president is in a position to get much of what he wants. Unfortunately, what the president seems to want is the same mostly symbolic victory over the "1 percent" he has pursued since the start of the campaign season a million years ago.

He has sought higher taxes on couples making more than $250,000 or singles earning more than $200,000, whether it makes an impression on deficit reduction or not (hint: not much) or whether it helps resolve the knottier inequities downstream from "fairness" issues involving the rich (hint: not at all).

That single-minded resolve worked fine as a campaign theme, but it does not help push the nation from the precipice looming like a modern-day Mayan calendar on the other side of Dec. 31.

Economic forecasters are developing precise projections of what awaits us in 2013 if Washington fails to adequately repair the nation's finances: layoffs in key industries; the possibility of another downgrade in the national credit rating; and, likely, another recession.

The question, then, is not whether Obama is in a position to bend Republicans to his will, at least to some degree. Yes, he can. The real question is, to what?

The Simpson-Bowles commission reported its recommendations in November 2010. Its members urged caps on discretionary spending, a 15-cent-per-gallon gasoline tax and limitations on the growth of government. Its primary recommendations, though, were a lower, fairer corporate tax, as well as lower overall rates paired with the elimination of most deductions.

The advantages of the Simpson-Bowles recommendations, or something like them, are many. The main advantages regard the ability of American corporations to compete worldwide, thus increasing their capacity to create jobs, and the ability of the feds to stabilize the nation's books by increasing revenue without increasing overall rates.

No compromise will satisfy either side. But a deal anchored in a Simpson-Bowles formulation at least tells citizens and ratings agencies the U.S. is serious at last about closing its shocking deficit gap. And there is a lot of value in that alone.

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Editorial: Get serious about finances

President Obama should embrace the financial recommendations of the Simpson Bowles commission.